


Unraveled: An Essay on the "Harder To Be Brave, Easier to Hide" storyline

by Estirose



Series: Harder to be Brave, Easier to Hide [12]
Category: Power Rangers R.P.M.
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 14:18:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4790435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Estirose/pseuds/Estirose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at the "Harder To Be Brave, Easier to Hide" storyline. </p><p>Warnings for suicidal ideation and discussions of suicide methods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unraveled: An Essay on the "Harder To Be Brave, Easier to Hide" storyline

**Author's Note:**

> This is an essay, or at least a bunch of musings about the "Harder to be Brave, Easier to Hide" storyline. Like the fics it talks about, I need to put warnings on this. I talk about attempted suicide, suicidal ideation, and some methods of committing suicide.

In some ways, the "Harder to be Brave" series was one of the most personal set of fics I've ever written. The funny thing is, it wasn't meant to be that way; I was writing a clever one-shot that rang as real as possible, and ended up with an entire series of 9 fics (7, if you count the fanfiction.net compilation of three fics) and one remix.

So, let me tell you a bit about these fics, in order.

The first fic in the series, of course, is "Harder to be Brave". It's the least-read fic of the series because you can get the gist of Ziggy's actions from "Easier to Hide", but it's the basis of all the rest of these fics. It was meant to be a standalone, short fic about what Ziggy might do if he decided that the best thing for what was left of the world was for him to free the morpher up. Which of course meant dying. It's very, very much a what-if, based on his tendency towards bluster, which I thought could hide a very insecure personality and depression.

Now, the first thing that I figured out - as did Ziggy - was that if he wanted to try to kill himself, there were ways that weren't viable. When you're suicidal, you start looking around and try to find viable ways that might work that you can easily do/stand/manage. For someone that lived around Rangers and was looking at a life fairly tightly-monitored as a Ranger, some things were much out of the question. Trying to blast himself was out of the question; Doctor K was really not big on people handling weapons and she'd certainly be alert if Ziggy did that. Likewise, anything else involving anything in the Garage was out. So, his choice was to go outside - with the added bonus that Doctor K couldn't track him down without his morpher, which he planned to leave in the Garage as he didn't want Venjix's forces getting a hold of it.

It was when I got him out of the Garage that I ran into a slight problem. He'd decided, for some reason, that he needed to die around sunrise or so. Why, I'm not sure, but sometimes when you're depressed at that level, you're not thinking very straight. So, upon running into his "friend" Maria, he decided to have breakfast. Maria herself was not designed as the most sympathetic of characters. She's blunt, she makes some rather wrong assumptions, she's got a mother hen streak a mile wide that can be annoying. On the other hand, she does give someone for Ziggy to talk to (as well as providing the title of the story), and it does keep him in one place for Doctor K and Dillon to find. She also is mentioned (in a way) in "The Dreamt-of Call", as the girl sitting next to Mrs. Landsdown in her job. (She's not mentioned by name, but she's referenced.)

I had to handwave how exactly Doctor K found him, because of course she couldn't find him in "Run Ziggy Run", where Tenaya had his morpher. I decided that the best way to do so was to just say that there was something temporary that she could lock into. It seems to have worked, and fits with Doctor K being very bright.

Now, one might wonder why neither Doctor K nor Dillon picked up that Ziggy was suicidal. Well, for one thing, neither of them has great social skills, and might not know that Ziggy was "off". In addition, Ziggy had been careful not to tip anybody off intentionally.

Of course, the fact that Dillon hadn't said anything (partly because I couldn't write Dillon to save my life at that point) led several reviewers on fanfiction.net to ask why he hadn't said anything. So, armed with muses, I started Dillon's side of the story, which was "Easier to Hide".

I started it with the expectation that it would be easier to write Dillon if I was writing in his POV (and canon review helped), and that the story would be about him dealing with Ziggy's actions in the first story. What I wasn't expecting was Flynn, Summer, and Scott to decide to be a part of the tale. In the end, though, this turned out to be a good thing; while I don't mind team problems in my fic (even if I am often crap at writing them), getting the other three involved insured that everybody was at least on the same page.

Of course, Dillon was the one to figure it out. While Ziggy hadn't intended to leave any clues (and for that matter, Dillon figured it out using a completely wrong assumption), there was enough going on that Dillon pieced everything together. A big part of it was when Ziggy relaxed when the other three were completely guessing the wrong thing, though he does slip up a tiny bit. Or actually, he wants the others to get used to the idea that there might be a new opening for a Ranger Green in the near future. This probably also helped Dillon figure things out.

And then you get his announcement (which he probably would have preferred to do in private as well), and of course everybody… doesn't take too well to Ziggy's plan. Of course, Ziggy doesn't bother to deny it because he's a bit shocked too, and I think not ready to die either.

Therefore, Doctor K put him on Suicide Watch, and Dillon hauls him off, and that's the end of that story.

Well, about then I realized that I wanted to go into how the first day or so went. But first, I really wanted to get a bit more comfortable than I was with the other three (at the time) Rangers. So, the "Holding Boxes" sequence was born, starting with Flynn removing all of Ziggy's stuff and making plans to make sure Ziggy was safe, in his own way. Summer, who checked in on him, and Scott and Doctor K, who tried to figure out what the hell to do. Scott and Doctor K's dialogue proved important in the next story, and I knew what Flynn was doing with his plans, but most of the three stories was kind of filler.

(A small trivia note: "Policies and Procedures", Scott's fic, was so titled because I was studying policies and procedures in school at the time. I couldn't imagine the Rangers did have procedures for such a thing as a suicidal Ranger, because they had not anticipated Ziggy, at all.)

The next story, pretty much the last of the main ones, is "Sunrises, Sunsets, and Precut Muffins", which is Ziggy's first day under Watch. (He remains on it for a week.) I knew the first part would be Ziggy's bit (featuring Dillon), then Scott, Summer, and Flynn, because that was the order I set up in "Holding Boxes". And the last part was Ziggy, again. Of course, I wouldn't know exactly what would happen, but I knew that it would be the three trying to get Ziggy to realize that yes, despite what he believed, that they accepted him.

It opens with Dillon and Ziggy, with Ziggy on the roof (where he's really not supposed to be), contemplating the sunrise and if a fall from said roof would kill him. It's a sign that even though he knows that he's on Suicide Watch, he's still thinking of how to end his life, something that doesn't change until a little later on. He's also starting to put on a "I'm keeping a low profile and making it seem like everything's okay" type of attitude so he can fool everybody into thinking it's all right, he's not a danger to himself, they can stop watching him, so maybe he can get away at some point.

Which, of course, is not going to happen. Flynn has made him breakfast, to the extent that he makes it clear that he doesn't trust Ziggy with any kind of knife. (Scott does call him on this.) Ziggy, trying to get his teammates out of this mindset, goes and insists on training - he figures it will be better than them acting like Flynn is, and he at least gets to do something instead of dying of boredom while waiting for them to stop worrying about him. Plus, if he does have to live, dying in battle is kind of not his idea of fun. Of course, neither is being sedated by Doctor K, whatever she has in mind, so he's eager to get off of Watch before he finds out.

He ends up training with Scott, who turns out to be a decent teacher (mostly because he's trying to both teach Ziggy to fight and not discourage him because he knows Ziggy's depressed). They take a break, Ziggy tries to convince Scott that he's okay, not to worry, and Scott reminds him that there's a reason why he's on Suicide Watch. Ziggy kind of loses it at this point because really, he's not going to kill himself on base, he's not stupid, and goes off on Scott about how bad things had been for him the previous day. And then has a breakdown.

Because, sometimes you just have to cry, and your body doesn't care in front of whom.

This is where Scott mentions something that kind of comes up during "Policies and Procedures" and that I didn't really follow up on in this storyline. The morpher scanned Ziggy, gave its approval, and he of course reacted to it and bonded. It wasn't just because he was saving the morpher from Tenaya; in a way, the morpher had chosen him. I kind of followed up on the idea vaguely in "The Dreamt-of Call" and also in "Must Be This Tall", which is Ziggy's bond from the morpher's POV. In the story, Ziggy realizes that he wanted to live, or at least some part of him did, when Tenaya came after him, and so he took the chance and the choice, which kind of makes him think that maybe he does want to live.

Of course, there is something about human life and human spirit. Most of us don't want to die. Most of us do want to live, and something about us realizes this. Ziggy, too, wanted to live. He didn't want to take off the morpher, to make himself vulnerable, but he forced himself to go towards death. Of course, as a Ranger he'd go towards death anyway, but not as someone deliberately seeking to end their own life. (This is why Doctor K and Scott didn't want him in combat; not only couldn't he fight, they weren't sure that he wouldn't try to be 'heroic' and try to get himself killed in the name of saving others. And this was way before "Ranger Green" and Doctor K's discovery of Ziggy's past!)

Summer's bit was convincing Ziggy that she and the others would really have missed him. Summer speaks here with an echo of Maria's words, but she follows them up by talking about the impact Ziggy's suicide would have had on the team. No matter how short a time he'd have been a Ranger, it would have impacted the team to have him kill himself (albeit by getting himself killed by gangsters), leaving them with the guilt of dealing what what they could have done or not have done to keep him alive, thus making the team less cohesive and made it easier for Venjix to win. It's not really touched upon, but if Ziggy had succeeded, it really could have meant the end of the world.

He doesn't realize this, but he does try, once again, to try to convince them that everything's all right. Of course, he mostly convinces himself that everything is going to be all right if everybody stops worrying about him, but that's another issue.

It's Flynn that gets him to make a plan, a promise that he'll talk to someone about things if he gets to the point where he wants to kill himself again. I figured it would be right up Flynn's alley, and he does get Ziggy to promise, though I get the sense that Ziggy would promise anything to get out of what he's in. If it gets them to stop worrying, it's all for it. Of course, what also helps is Flynn's decision to get Doctor K to focus on dodge training for Ziggy, treating him as normal as he can (after admitting he overreacted). It also helps that by the time Ziggy got to Flynn, he'd gone through Scott and Summer, and started to realize that these people bizarrely did care for him and weren't going to let him go. And the exercise, though he didn't realize it, helped.

So, of course by the time they get to the evening, Ziggy's still depressed, but he's not going to be committing suicide. He's not okay. He's not back to normal. But he is willing to admit to Dillon that he was willing to jump over the edge that morning, and Dillon is relieved that Ziggy stopped himself. (He really would put Ziggy in the hospital if Ziggy tried to kill himself. And Ziggy believes him.)

After all, what are friends for?

The last piece, kind of a coda to the story, is set years later after Ziggy and Doctor K establish their school as planned. Ziggy isn't the suicidal one in this story; that belongs to a middle schooler named Lydia (not the same girl as the one in "Dreamt-of Call"). She tells him she's worthless and nobody likes her and she wants to kill herself.

Ziggy tries to convince her that someone out there loves her, and she's not worthless, and ends up telling her about his own experience, how it turned out the people he thought hated him didn't, and ended up saving him. And then he makes her make the same promise that Flynn made him make, reflecting back to the series as a whole. In the end, we also see Doctor K, who he's married to, come into his office and they talk shortly about the matter.

While the story sums up the rest of the storyline, the most important part of it is really how Ziggy's changed, and how Doctor K reacted. There's a section in there that talks about how Doctor K was feeling, what she felt about things. Of course, the relationship that forms between them wasn't quite there yet, but there was a certain fear that she couldn't get another user after Ziggy died, and she still wanted to know about why he was chosen. (Story-wise, because he was a good guy who delivered medicine to orphans at the risk of his own life; however, the morpher didn't know that and selected him on physical characteristics alone.) And there was a sense of "no, you are not going to do this. You are going to save the world whether you like it or not, since the morpher accepted you."

On AO3, I have "Unburdening Oneself", that last story, as the one that completes the main sequence, even though it's not critical to the rest of the storyline. I also have three other fics, one of which is a missing scene for "Sunrises, Sunsets", one is a piece set after that story, and one is a remix of "Harder to be Brave".

"Buying Shirts" is about Flynn getting shirts for Ziggy, because Ziggy doesn't seem to have that many green shirts in his brief time before becoming a Ranger, and lots after. In that universe, someone has to go clothes shopping for him, and Flynn is the one who does it. He buys non-canon light green shirts because I wanted Ziggy to have some, even if he never wore them in canon. As a point of trivial, the girl in the clothing store that helps Flynn with his shopping is an OC of mine named Marie Brown, a slightly Sueish (she was created for a Mary Sue challenge) Ninja Storm character who could blow monsters up. In most incarnations, she's either a pyrokinetic or a weak mage. (She's also the clerk that helps Ziggy in "One Step After Another", which I wrote under the pen name "GraVirTy".)

"Lighter Duty" is set later on in the week, and it's where Scott realizes that everything might actually be all right with Ziggy now, and it might be okay to put him back on training. It also solidifies something that was said in "Sunrises, Sunsets", that Ziggy wasn't (as) sucidal after he started training that day. Noteable that Doctor K does sedate Ziggy off-screen in the story, that Ziggy reacts well to an anklet, and that Ziggy goes back to training - evasion at least. I imagine shortly after that, that Ziggy does get off Watch.

The last side-story so far is "Now the City's Own", which is the only fic in the entire series that doesn't require a warning, because it's set in Maria's POV and Maria is absolutely clueless. It's "Harder to be Brave" set in her viewpoint, because I thought it would be interesting, and because I knew that most people don't like writing/expanding other peoples' OCs. (I do - I did so twice for Remix Madness, in fact - but most people don't.) So, here's what she thought was going on, which was totally not what was going on.

In all, it was more than 15,000 words when you count everything, including the side stories. And most of it was written in about a week, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. I wasn't intending to write it, not at all, but I think I needed to. People enjoy it, which is important, but I think what's important to me is that I got it all out


End file.
